dishonorable work, I shall particularize. You may knit a tidy for the
back of an armchair, but by no means make the money wherewith to buy
the chair. You may, with delicate brush, beautify a mantel-ornament,
but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble mantel. You may
learn artistic music until you can squall Italian, but never sing
"Ortonville" or "Old Hundred." Do nothing practical, if you would, in
the eyes of refined society, preserve your respectability.

I scout these finical notions. I tell you a woman, no more than a man,
has a right to occupy a place in this world unless she pays a rent for
it.

In the course of a lifetime you consume whole harvests, and droves of
cattle, and every day you live breathe forty hogsheads of good pure
air. You must, by some kind of usefulness, _pay_ for all this. Our
race was the last thing created,--the birds and fishes on the fourth
day, the cattle and lizards on the fifth day, and man on the sixth
day. If geologists are right, the earth was a million of years in the
possession of the insects, beasts, and birds, before our race came
upon it. In one sense, we were innovators. The cattle, the lizards,
and the hawks had pre-emption right. The question is not what we are
to do with the lizards and summer insects, but what the lizards and
summer insects are to do with us.

If we want a place in this world we must _earn_ it. The partridge
makes its own nest before it occupies it. The lark, by its morning
song, earns its breakfast before it eats it; and the Bible gives an
intimation that the first duty of an idler is to starve, when it
says if he "will not work, neither shall he eat." Idleness ruins the
health; and very soon Nature says, "This man has refused to pay his